At the DNC, the Democrats Are Finally Fighting

But they are also running as normal people who are running against people who are aberrant, dangerous, and, well, as Democrats have repeatedly hammered in recent weeks, weird. One of the most notable things about this convention in which practically every speaker mentions the “joy” of the candidate is that it has also been sharply partisan; refreshingly plain in ways that Democrats have, in recent years, often been reluctant to demonstrate. This is a convention that attacks Donald Trump as a rich man who only cares about other rich people and that correctly depicts Republicans—not all of them, mind you, but many of them—as intent on subverting democracy, trampling individual rights, all in the service of a tiny, freakish and plutocratic elite. It’s a good message—and a different one than Democrats have pushed in the past. 

“In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” Harris said as she accepted the party’s presidential nomination on Thursday. “But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” She then laid out a litany of Trump’s post-election sins and crimes. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States…to serve the only client he has ever had: himself.” That has been Harris’s message this week, and it’s an effective change of pace. Her speech attacked Trump and used her middle-class upbringing and relationship with her mother to make the case that she would put the interests of the country ahead of her own. Tim Walz did something similar, largely eschewing the “weird” talk to play up his past as a teacher and high school football coach. 

But the rest of the convention has been bare knuckled. Even the notoriously high-going Michelle Obama accused Trump of “going small.” Speakers have led a stirring attack on Republican policy, particularly the Heritage Foundation-penned “Project 2025,” the proposed political agenda for a second Trump term from which the former president is now trying to run away. The convention has been a four-day broadside against Trump’s racism and misogyny and the Republican Party’s numerous assaults on individual liberties, particularly reproductive rights.